On Wednesday, July 9, 2003, at 11:50 AM, Philippe Lafoucrière wrote:
> I propose you a brand new website based on plone which would help to
> create a bigger and more reactive community. I've started developing
> one.
Philippe, I applaud this effort, but I think that you're working on
something different than what you think you're working on ;-).
twistedmatrix.com is the central distribution site for the software and
documentation. That's not to say the site doesn't need help - far from
it, it definitely needs a new maintainer! - but something authored with
CMF or Plone is more of a "community" website; this is like the
distinction between http://starship.python.net/ and
http://www.python.org/.
I think it might be good to have a separate "User Community" and
"Developer Community". If you launch such a site, I will gladly link
to it from the front page of twistedmatrix.com.
These mailing lists are appropriate for much of the discussion that has
happened on them so far, but I do occasionally feel as if the core
Twisted development team is stifling experimentation outside the bounds
of our original intentions for the software.
There has been much talk of the "right way" to do things of late.
While I have strong feelings about what the "right way" is, and a lot
more design vision than implemented code, having the user community
veer off on some tangents to see what's possible and what "fits"
outside the auspices of the central development community might let us
exchange more fully-formed and coherent ideas. Right now I feel like
the discourse is too much like
Application Author: "Maybe-"
Developer: "No."
Author: "But-"
Developer: "Sorry."
Author: "Oh."
Developer: "See?"
Author: "What's woven.guard?"
Developer: "ARRRGH" *bang*
If the application authors themselves had a community to discuss ideas
and present them fully-formed, we might see something more like:
Author[s]: "Can we include advanced Frobnitz support in Twisted 1.5?"
Developer: "It's too complicated."
Author: "But I have a working implementation and it's only 500 lines
of Python."
Developer: "Oh, maybe that's not so bad. Would you contribute it?"
Author: "Sure. But, what about woven.guard support?"
Developer: "ARRRRGH" *bang*
And eventually, we can omit the last exchange as some of us have more
free time to actually document various APIs more clearly.